1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to document management, and more particularly to a method for managing and selectively arranging sets of multiple documents and pages within documents.
2. Related Art
The creation, distribution, and management of information are core functions of business. Information or content can be presented in a variety of different ways, including word processing documents, spreadsheets, graphics, photographs, engineering drawings, architectural plans, and so forth. In electronic form, these are generally referred to as documents, and may be generated and manipulated by computer software applications that are specific thereto. A typical workflow in the enterprise involves various personnel, oftentimes across disparate geographic locations, collaborating to create, review, and/or edit such documents.
Due to the existence of many different computing platforms having a wide variety of operating systems, application programs, and processing and graphic display capabilities, it has been recognized by those in the art that a device-independent, resolution-independent file format was necessary to facilitate such exchange. In response to this need, the Portable Document Format (PDF), amongst other competing formats, has been developed.
The PDF standard is a combination of a number of technologies, including a simplified PostScript interpreter subsystem, a font embedding subsystem, and a storage subsystem. As those in the art will recognize. PostScript is a page description language for generating the layout and the graphics of a document. Further, per the requirements of the PDF storage subsystem, all elements of the document, including text vector graphics, and raster (bitmap) graphics, collectively referred to herein as graphic elements, are encapsulated into a single file. The graphic elements are not encoded to a specific operating system, software application, or hardware, but are designed to be rendered to the same manner regardless of the specificities relating to the system writing or reading such data. The cross-platform capability of PDF aided in its widespread adoption, and is now a de facto document exchange standard. Although originally proprietary, PDF has been released as an open standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 3200-1:2008. Currently, PDF is utilized to encode a wide variety of document types, including those composed largely of text, and those composed largely of vector and raster graphics. Because of its versatility and universality, files in the PDF format are often preferred over more particularized file formats of specific applications.
Depending on workflow conventions that may be particular to a single business, or common amongst similar businesses or across an industry, document management can vary in complexity. The most basic practice is to store a single document in a single file on a hierarchical file system that is organized according to directories and subdirectories. This may be suitable for simple projects where there is a single document of minimal length, or where there are multiple documents, each are largely independent of the others and do not require concurrent review and/or revision. Some sharing may be possible to the extent the file system is connected to a network, such that different users are able to access the files from local or remote computers also connected to the network. In order to avoid applying conflicting changes, individual files are typically locked upon being opened, allowing access to only one user while all others are restricted.
Although there are collaboration systems known in the art that allow for the concurrent editing of documents by multiple users, these are typically separate applications layered over the file system. In avoiding these proprietary systems, one practice for managing a large document involving many collaborators is the segregation into multiple files (PDF or otherwise) according to groups of collaborators. For example, one section of the document may be particular to one business unit, while another section of the document, may be particular to another business unit. So long as the two sections and corresponding responsible business units are independent of each other, concurrent revisions are possible. In business fields such as engineering and architecture, multiple drawings for different aspects of the component or structure may be produced as part of a single project, and each drawing may be stored in a separate file. Furthermore, addendum that supersede earlier versions of documents or drawings may be stored together with the older versions. In each of the aforementioned cases, combining the files into a single one is deficient for a number of different reasons, including increased complexity, page count, and file size, the aforementioned file locking issue, and so forth. Some of the individual documents may be secured and flagged with attributes that explicitly prohibit such aggregation.
Nevertheless, it is desirable in some cases to view the entire collection of files making up the single document or multiple documents in a project all at once as a cohesive whole. Existing solutions require that all of the pertinent files be opened concurrently in order for the document to be viewed and navigated as a whole, largely negating the advantages of maintaining separate files for each document page or document segment. Furthermore, tracking each of the addendum and presenting the most recent version along with the remainder of the document or documents is not possible unless the files are particularly named with proper revision numbers and the older files are designated as outdated. This process is prone to error because the modifications must be made manually, and in some cases, security attributes may be set that prohibit such modifications and references to and from new/old versions. The ordering of the document and of the individual pages therein is limited to that structure set forth in the document itself and is therefore inflexible.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a method for managing and selectively arranging sets of multiple documents and pages within documents. There is also a need in the art for such arranged sets to be of PDF documents.